2 Earthquakes Shake L.A.

Two moderate earthquakes, measuring magnitudes 4.3 and 4.1, struck within 25 minutes of each other near the city of San Fernando before 7 p.m. Saturday, briefly clogging some phone lines, but causing no damage or injuries.

The quakes came within four days of the seventh anniversary of the magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake of Jan. 17, 1994, which killed 57 and caused $40 billion in damage. Scientists said Saturday’s temblors were not related to the 1994 quake.

“We’re calling it a new event,” said Lucy Jones, director of the Pasadena field station of the U.S. Geological Survey. “We are not calling them aftershocks. We haven’t had a magnitude 4 aftershock from Northridge in more than two years.”

The Saturday evening quakes were centered two miles east northeast of San Fernando. The first occurred at 6:26 p.m. and the second at 6:51 p.m. There also were several lesser jolts.

Some residents said the later quake felt stronger. This apparently was because it was shallower than the first. The first was four miles deep, the second only 2 1/2 miles.

The quakes were felt across much of the Los Angeles Basin. A shake map issued by Caltech and the Geological Survey showed that they were felt from the Ventura County coast on the west, as far south as the Palos Verdes Peninsula and as far east as the San Gabriel Valley. They were felt distinctly in downtown Los Angeles.

Jones called them “garden variety earthquakes, the kind that occurs somewhere in Southern California several times a year.”

But especially for those who had moved to the quake area since Northridge, the temblors came as quite a shock.

After the second jolt, Elizabeth Marcheschi sent her husband, Michael, to a supermarket in Valencia to buy a dozen 1-gallon bottles of water and fresh batteries for their portable radio.

“We left Chicago six years ago, where the snow and the cold shows that God is trying to get you,” Michael Marcheschi said. “Here, it comes out of nowhere.”

Jessica Deschaine, a recent South Carolina transplant who works in the china department at Macy’s in the Northridge Fashion Center, said she was horrified.

“It was my first one,” she said. “I totally freaked while it was going on. I’d rather have hurricanes.”

But at a nearby counter in the store, Nina Minster wasn’t fazed. “I’ve been in California my whole life,” she said. “I just ride ‘em out.”

In San Fernando, near the epicenter, not a single resident called police.

“It was just a jolt,” said Officer Leonard Yniguez of the San Fernando police. “The only people calling in, quite honestly, are newspaper people.”

Meanwhile, a considerably stronger quake occurred early Saturday off California’s North Coast. This magnitude 5.4 quake took place at 5:08 a.m. and was centered under the ocean 61 miles west of Eureka. It was far enough offshore that no damage or injuries were reported from it either.

Times staff writers Carol Chambers, Holly Wolcott, Maggie Barnett and Richard Winton contributed to this story.